When I started this new blog, I wanted my first post to serve as a thesis statement—something that projected forward. For my second, I felt compelled to revisit the last blog post from my previous website. That post is both the reason I stopped writing and the reason I returned.

In March 2023, I published a post about a body of work I called Shadow Work. In it, I labeled the project a “failure.” Almost everyone who read the post disagreed. Some thought I was being too critical of the images, others rejected the notion that art could ever truly “fail”, and some tried to gently inform me that “artists sometimes make projects just for themselves.”

In college, I developed the habit of writing artist statements. Once I begin to sink my teeth into a project, I can become a bit obsessed. If I’m not out with my camera or editing, I’m researching similar work and writing about the project. The structure of writing a formal artist statement helps me clarify and sharpen my ideas, leads to creative breakthroughs, and serves as a milestone for tracking a project’s evolution. However, this process has also led me into crisis on occasion.

Until I sat down to write an artist statement about it, I saw Shadow Work as an extension of a longer-running series I’ll call Ground. When I couldn’t write an artist statement for Shadow Work, I revisited my past statements for Ground and was dismayed to find that these new imagesdidn’t work with them. I didn’t know what Shadow Work was, but I knew it wasn’t what I thought it was. Due to that uncertainty and disappointment, I concluded that they were a failure.

The Ground series began in March 2008, the morning after I attempted to take my own life. When I came to, my first thought was that I had photography homework. So, I mixed some screwdrivers in orange juice bottles, packed my photo kit, and headed out. As I polished off a pint’s worth of vodka on the flooded banks of Stones River, I found that I couldn’t make a case for living. Despite that, I began filling a roll of film with photos of my immediate area anyway. That was how the series started.

I hadn’t fully understood the weight of these images until writing this post. Every photograph in Ground was made in a place where I was considering ending my life. I always told myself that these photos were about finding images that didn’t exist, but I couldn’t say what was missing. They are photos with one foot in a grave—staring at the ground, looking for something of value in the lack of a chalk outline.

At the heart of these images is a denial; an uncertainty about being alive. Part of me felt that I had really died in my attempt in 2008 and was stuck in limbo. Realizing this state in January 2024, and letting go of it, gave me a new lease on life and ended this series. It will likely take years to fully process what it means to me, and likely longer to settle on a better name.

“When a photographer works intuitively, the photographs reflect the condition of the photographer’s inner state at the moment of exposure.” – Minor White

In September 2022, I began practicing Jungian shadow work as an extension of my practices in Zen Buddhism & Thelema. My primary approach involved walking meditation followed by journaling. During these meditations I would take a photo anytime a thought “struck me” or somehow stuck out enough to grab my attention. Later in the day I would dissect those thoughts, tracing them back to their origin.

This practice was intended to help me understand and come to face with the unconscious actions and reactions that drive me. As I edited the images, I journaled. The photos were pure reaction, without conscious composition, serving more as punctuation than creative act. Their primary role was to lock in the memory of the thought that caught my attention.    

The photographs created in this process were incidental to my aims. By my standards of what makes a successful body of work, they failed. It didn’t fit within my existing body of work, the project they came from wasn’t “artistic” in nature, nor did it achieve any artistic goal.

The function of a camera is to capture a moment, but the function of the photographer is to give it meaning. – Minor White

Between 2023 and 2024, my life underwent seismic shifts. I had long suppressed my past, reducing it to an abstracted list of facts. Shadow Work shattered that mental construct, unleashing memories I had buried for decades. In the span of a year, I came out as bisexual and nonbinary, underwent a social and medical gender transition, acknowledged and accepted multiple disabilities, started trauma therapy, and finally admitted to a lifelong struggle with mental illness.

The details of this transformation will take a lifetime to process, and there is already a photo series that speaks to it—but that is a story for another time. The experience altered my self-perception to such a degree that I ended up changing my name. I still don’t know how I managed to stay married through the entire ordeal, but bless Emilie for staying.

“There are at least two people in every photo: the photographer and the viewer. The photographer viewing the work can never be the photographer who created the image, because the act of creation is an act of change.” Dr. James Norton (MTSU)

The Ground series was born from pain, but ultimately a success. The images are strong, composed, deeply meaningful, and have held up for me for over a decade. On the other hand, Shadow Work was a failure. The images aren’t bad, and the project is complete, but in truth it was never a photography project to begin with.

And yet, in retrospect, I can’t help but see Shadow Work as a successful body of work. When the images were first taken, they weren’t intended to be art. As I processed them, they weren’t art. But, now, when I assemble, sequence, and present them with artistic intention, they became something new.

The photographer who created these images in 2022 could not have assembled them into a successful portfolio. She did not yet exist. The act of creating Shadow Work changed me, and only through that transformation would I begin to recognize its value as an artistic work.